Pruning

I don't know why, but I'm always obsessed with keeping things organized.

When I try to e-mail from the forum, so many of the addresses are bad e-mail addresses because they were either spammers or people have registered and then never returned and since changed their e-mail address.

I'm not about numbers. I never really have been. Sure, it's fun to watch the Facebook Fanpage or Twitter follower numbers grow, but I really don't look that often. I enjoy the people who actively communicate with me.

I've thought about doing this before, but on a whim, I decided to do it today.

Here were the stats in the forum before I pruned the forum. You will see there are 4,067 members.

I set the software to delete everyone who has not logged in since December 31, 2008, (almost 2 years) and who had zero posts. Now there are only 2,446 members left.

Wow! So many have joined and never participated at all!

Of course, I welcome all of them to return. They just need to create a new account.

So when you see stats in other forums, please know they are a false outlook of the site, especially if these numbers include spambot members. I know a lot of the early members here were spambot accounts. I feel I get fewer of them now that I've set stricter settings in the forum, but I was naive when I first opened up!

I know that smaller databases run smoother, so that is my main reason for taking this action.

Dawn did personally e-mail everyone when we started the newsetter inviting them to join, so if anyone was interested, they are getting the newsletter and can rejoin.

I figure that most of the freebies that people come for are in an area that everyone must have posted at least once to see, so these people who have not logged in for almost 2 years are not even interested in those and a big percentage of them won't even notice their account was removed.

I hope you all don't think I'm crazy for pruning!

Now, to run some optimazation scripts to keep things runnings smooth.